Finally, after much consternation and many hours of futzing, I present: The New Blog-Thing. Why?

There’s several reasons… First, I was unsatisfied with LiveJournal. It’s a great little place to store your journal for free with no ads. It, as is so typical of things open-source, is rather functional but pathetically inept in the user-interface and pretty-looking departments. As you can see, even this default layout is much, much prettier than LiveJournal. It doesn’t look like I want it to yet– after all I must make it all very, very black so that various readers can be frustrated in their own various ways which are not well understood by me. To me, white on black is a much more natural state for things, but I’ve gotten a few complaints. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll just find something blue. The comment system on LiveJournal left much to be desired. This comment system should prove to be far better. And little things, like everytime Joanna posts, since all other usernames were taken, she’s “JonahB52” which might not bother you, but bothers me.

There’s also the reason that I’ve got this weird geeky file-control-proximity thing. I want the files in my apartment. Nevermind that my servers are unreliable and on a crappy cable connection–they’re mine.

And that’s the downside. I fear that this may be a bit slow. Computer nonsense to follow, non-geeks can skip to the next paragraph. The New Blog-Thing is powered by an open source project called WordPress which is running on a Debian Linux Pentium Pro 200mhz server. (oldie but goodie) I’m a little worried it might be something more of a security risk on here, but then I remember that the rest of JoannandBerck.us is running on a very, very old installation of OpenBSD… Which means that while it WAS the most secure OS in the world, it’s now probably one of the less secure. Why is it so old? Because I don’t really KNOW OpenBSD and updating it at this point requires massive surgery and much time. (The rest of the site is on an ancient AMD K6 200mhz system, but fortunately it doesn’t do much.) I’ll get around to it someday, but the worst that can happen is that someone trashes it completely and I have a good reason to reinstall a secure system. There’s more to lose on the Debian system, and while it’s updated every couple of days, it is running a web server. Any geeks who’d like to poke and prod for weaknesses in this server– please have at it. It needs some work, both in cleaning up the performance and security. But it’s not all that bad. After all, I could be running it on a Windows server or something.

So, if you happen to notice that the New Blog-Thing is also Horrifically Slow, let me know. If it’s really all that bad, I may just have to leave things with LiveJournal. But, those of you who I’ve querried about the move JoannaandBerck.us have said it’s okay, so I think this shoudl be to. Even though it’s prettier, it’s still fairly light-weight. Even though I’m going to add graphics, eventually.

So here it is. Mess with it. Leave comments. I’m going to see if I can’t import all the LiveJournal entries, and if it’s all golden, just switch over to… The New Blog-Thing.

P.S. — I know this font’s spacing and such might not be the easiest to read from your special window to the internet. Do let me know what you think in general though. I’ll be trying to change things to something with serifs.